Red Hat sees growth spurt as cos seek to slash costs

ET BureauMar 31, 2009, 02.43pm IST

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Leading open source provider Red Hat is witnessing a spurt in growth alongside a global tendency to seek value for money. Red Hat India president and managing director Nandu Pradhan told ET that the company was witnessing good traffic with its customers and partners, with the performance reflected in high double digit growth.

Red Hat had global revenues totaling $ 653 million for the fiscal ending February 2009, with double-digit growths through all four quarters. Red Hat's value proposition of lower costs is considered to be an even stronger inducement for companies that are seeking to cut costs during the present financial crunch.

Earlier this year, Red Hat had signed up with Microsoft to enable expanded virtualization interoperability in response to customer demand. The company had also recently bought out Qumranet, which is expected to help offer a comprehensive virtualisation platform for enterprise customers.

Red Hat adopts the subscription model that lets users pay for services including training and support rather than pay the total cost for an entire product, thus saving companies the capital expenditure they would otherwise have incurred.

Mr Pradhan said while Red Hat's annual subscriptions and 3-year subscriptions were the popular ones for customers, a decade-long subscription for mission critical applications announced in Japan in association with Fujitsu had also captured the market's fancy.

He said several state governments in the country were also users of open source software, of which the Kerala government had taken particularly significant strides in utilizing educational solutions on open source platform.

According to Mr Pradhan, the open source concept was fast catching on India, with the country metamorphosing from being primarily a consumer of open source software to presently being one of the top three contributors to open source development.